


In the Wake of Retribution

by Comatosejoy



Category: Naruto
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, First Time, Fourth Shinobi War, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Sex with a stranger, Slow Burn, Smoking, Underage Drinking, Vaginal Sex, Violence, War, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:22:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 20,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22670122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Comatosejoy/pseuds/Comatosejoy
Summary: "Everyone who frequents the bars before five o’clock is retired or a civilian, which is good because he doesn’t want to be recognized. He is sick of that look of pity,the did you hears?s and thepoor kids. He’s not old enough to buy alcohol, but the lack of restful sleep and nauseating levels of nicotine in his system make him look much older."In the wake of Asuma's death and Shikamaru's subsequent revenge, Shikamaru tries different methods of coping. Incomplete.
Relationships: Nara Shikamaru/Original Female Character(s), Nara Shikamaru/Temari
Comments: 69
Kudos: 148





	1. Chapter 1

When the clouds of dirt touch his cheeks after he buries that piece of shit, Shikamaru fully expects to feel relieved. It’s over. Asuma has been avenged. He lights another cigarette, having not been satisfied by the first. He is new enough to smoking that the nicotine high has already made his head spin, new enough that he’d thrown up the night before after smoking an entire pack, desperate to keep the scent of his sensei fresh in his mind. He purses the cigarette between his lips, not knowing how to proceed. He doesn’t feel any better. 

Briefly, he thinks about Naruto’s Sasuke. He wonders if Sasuke would feel any kind of catharsis when he reaches his own goals. Sasuke is a fool, though, too much of a slave to his whims and emotions. Shikamaru has never liked Sasuke, but he especially dislikes the thirst for revenge they share. Shikamaru knew the difference between him and Sasuke, however. He had the Will of Fire, and he knew when to stop. 

When he wakes the next morning, before he even craves a cigarette, he stumbles outside in a robe to light up, glancing up at the clouds and taking a drag so deep that his lungs ache a bit. He envisions the bronchi of his lungs going black with tar as he does it and doesn’t particularly care. He would be lucky to live long enough to get lung cancer given the high-risk nature of his profession.

Asuma smoked an old brand, favored by men in their sixties or older, so Shikamaru blends in well enough in the izakayas. He wants to play Shogi, smoke, drink, maybe. Everyone who frequents the bars before five o’clock is retired or a civilian, which is good because he doesn’t want to be recognized. He is sick of that look of pity, _the did you hears?_ s and the _poor kid_ s. He’s not old enough to buy alcohol, but the lack of restful sleep and nauseating levels of nicotine in his system make him look much older. The waitresses don’t think twice about serving him. He maintains eye contact with one as he brings the cup of sake to his lips and moves a piece on the Shogi board. His opponent, an older man with the thickest glasses Shikamaru has ever seen, sighs across from him. The waitress is still looking at him as she serves other patrons, and Shikamaru, despite knowing nothing about women, knows what it is she wants. 

“I forfeit,” he mutters, ignoring his opponent’s protests, and stands and follows her swaying hips to the back, through a hall, and into a broom closet. He guesses that she’s ten years older than he is, and as he brushes aside her yukata and rests his cheek on her inner thigh, he decides that he prefers older women. Surely a girl his own age wouldn’t allow what he was doing with his tongue right now. Or at least, wouldn’t allow it without exchanging names beforehand. He’s never done this before, but figures it couldn’t be nearly as hard as any of the older shinobi said. Judging by the noises his partner was making, Kotetsu is likely just an untalented lover. She yanks his head back by his ponytail and he groans, liking the sensation of getting his hair pulled.

“I figured you’d be the kind to want to get right down to business. I didn’t peg you for the patient type,” she said, her face flushed and and her breathing heavy. 

“You watched me play Shogi for two hours with a blind man and you didn’t think I had any patience?” Shikamaru smirks from between her thighs. “Or do you just want me to get on with it?” 

Shikamaru pulls himself up and ducks his head to kiss her. It occurs to him that this is his first kiss, and it also occurs to him that he doesn’t particularly think there’s anything special or sacred about it. The way Ino talked about how she wanted her first to be, he had expected to feel something. What he does feel is the woman’s small hands unbuttoning his pants to pull his length out. He closes the distance between them and pins her to the wall behind her, thrusting into her ungracefully and with a little too much enthusiasm. He tries to back off a little, tries not to look so much like a virgin, but he thinks she probably already knows. His suspicions are confirmed when he comes quickly and clumsily and she looks unsurprised if not disappointed. 

“I can help you finish,” he offers, but she’s closing her yukata already. 

“My break is over anyway,” she says, clearly trying not to look annoyed as she smoothes her hair down and opens the door. He stands in the broom closet alone for a minute or two, both in an attempt to not make it obvious what they’d just done and also to reflect on his circumstances. Grief takes unusual forms, he reasons, as he tries to justify why he’d just done that. He’d long thought the concept of virginity was a falsehood, so the fact that he doesn’t magically feel like a different man is no surprise to him. He doesn’t feel an afterglow like he’d read about, though he knows logically that his brain is releasing oxytocin in the wake of his completion. In fact, he’s overwhelmed by shame. He’s ashamed that his first time had gone disastrously, and ashamed at the thought of what Asuma would think of Shikamaru’s afternoon of vice.

“Troublesome,” he utters with disgust at himself before opening the door. 

His cheeks sting with embarrassment as he returns to his table and sees the waitress bussing dishes as though nothing happened. He pretends it’s a flush from the sake. A different waitress looks at him and giggles. They all know already. How do they all know already? He downs the rest of his drink, half hoping that he chokes on it and dies right there, and puts a few coins on the table. He nods at the old man in front of him. He was going to have to find a new place at which to grieve. Maybe a new town, too. Asuma would find this whole situation hilarious, and that makes his chest ache to think about. He reaches for his pack of cigarettes as he walks home, a little intoxicated. He hopes that the heavy scent of smoke will mask the scent of a woman and the liquor that he’s certain his mother would be able to detect as soon as he walks through the door. 

He rounds the corner a block away from the Nara compound and sees a head of dirty blonde in the middle of the road. He considers turning right around and walking somewhere else, but thinking about the outcome of each of his options, he decides to square his shoulders, and walks past her. 

“You aren’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow,” he says, facing away from her. 

“The extra day was more of a contingency,” Temari answers. “I figured I’d get here today.” 

“It’s my day off,” Shikamaru states. It’d be his luck that she would show up now, the scent of ethanol on his breath and a woman’s musk on his lips and chin. 

“I’ll say,” she says. “I didn’t realize you were a lush.” 

“You can’t keep anything from a kunoichi,” Shikamaru responds, fully exasperated that all his careful precautions--staying downwind, keeping his responses curt, keeping his back to her--had not masked his condition. 

“Not this kunoichi,” she smirks. “This explains why Lady Tsunade couldn’t find you when I arrived.” 

“I need a shower,” he says, walking away from her and toward his house. He half-hopes she leaves him alone until his escorting duties are officially given to him by Tsunade and half-hopes she follows behind him. Instead she reaches out and grabs his wrist. His eyes go wide at the contact, but still he does not turn around. 

“I heard what happened,” she says quietly. She is uncharacteristically gentle, and if he didn’t have such a finely trained ear he would think he was imagining her words. “I’m sorry.” 

“I’ve been hearing that a lot lately,” he says, turning to look at her in the eye. It comes out a little more bitterly than he intends it, and he instantly feels like an asshole. To make matters worse, Temari winces like she’s been hit. His skin burns where her hand is touching, and he looks down. They’ve been making physical contact for much longer than appropriate, and they both realize it at the same time. She drops his wrist quickly, and he stops slouching, standing to his full height, and looks down at her. She’s wearing a yukata, and he briefly imagines it was her in the broom closet. His eyes drift down to where the left side of the garment wraps around the right, and pictures brushing it aside and letting his mouth taste her. He compartmentalizes the thought to unpack later, or unpack never, and his cheeks turn red.

“Thank you,” he says finally, and means it.


	2. Chapter 2

The water doesn’t do anything to make him more alert, and he doesn’t feel clean after scrubbing his skin. Instead of getting out, though, he dips his head under the spray and rests his forehead on the tile. Just down the hall, Temari is seated at the table with his father, with his mother in the kitchen worrying over tea and angry that Shikamaru didn’t mention sooner that an escort mission was coming up. As if he knew she’d arrive early. He knows Temari is probably asking his father if he’s okay, and his father is probably giving a roundabout answer that essentially translates to not really. 

He wonders if he’s being petulant. Shikaku and Temari have both seen more death in battle than he has. Temari had lost both her parents. It occurs to him that perhaps he never appreciated just how real a possibility it was to lose a comrade. Who was to say that his father wouldn’t be the next to fall? Or Temari, Choji, or Ino? He clenches his fists as tears roll out of his eyes, mingling with the water from overhead. He turns the water off and makes some attempt to steady his breath and quell his tears. He wraps a towel around his waist, using a separate towel to vigorously wipe his face as he exits the bathroom, trying to make it look like his face is red from the heat and friction instead of his crying.

He rounds the corner and remembers, too late, that Temari is at the table. His mother throws something at him, shouting for him to put some clothes on. He doesn’t dodge it like he probably would have if he were stone-cold sober, and without a word, turns around to slink to his bedroom and retrieve clothes with a welt on his head. 

“Honestly, Temari, I don’t know what’s wrong with that boy today,” he hears her say. He tunes out their conversation but imagines the two women are exchanging criticisms about him and he rolls his eyes as he pulls a turtleneck over his chainmail. 

“Maybe you should drink some water,” Temari says conspicuously as he returns, and Shikamaru is certain she’s trying to get him caught. His eyes narrow as he grabs a glass and, not breaking eye contact, fills it with water and downs it. He still hasn’t said a word, terrified of his mother smelling alcohol on his exhale. If Temari hadn’t shown up, he could be safe in his room or watching the clouds in the early evening light.

“Troublesome woman,” comes out of his mouth before his brain has the chance to stop it. He’s nearly sober now, it having been an hour since he downed that final cup of sake, but he still grimaces as he waits for his mother to smell it and subsequently murder him. Temari is watching this and by all appearances knows exactly what’s going through Shikamaru’s head. Yoshino, blessedly, doesn’t detect anything. 

Shikamaru feels a headache coming on and deduces that it’s some mix of stress and introducing new poisons to his body. He pinches the bridge of his nose in some attempt to reduce the pressure building up and finds it doesn’t do any good. 

“Shall I escort you to your accommodations, Princess Temari?” Shikamaru asks flatly, suddenly both emotionally and physically exhausted. 

Temari knows when it’s time to tease and time to ease off and, sensing his weariness, nods and stands, leading the way out into the cool evening air. 

“You know,” she says in front of him. “I _am_ old enough to be in bars.” 

“That’s right, you are,” he answers, trying to sound as casual as possible as his mind flits to his newly-discovered preference for older women. 

“I had a mission a while back,” she continues. “I had to pretend to be a waitress. Had to seduce some old guy, lure him somewhere, and assassinate him.” 

He’s suddenly sweating. “Where is this going?” Shikamaru asks suspiciously. 

“It wasn’t far from here. In preparation for the mission, I learned something. Civilian women in this area prefer floral perfume. Back home civilian women like earthy smells, like sandalwood. Of course, a kunoichi can’t wear any perfume at all.” 

“Sure, it would be too easy for an enemy to track you if you smelled like roses,” Shikamaru answers, deciding that the best strategy in this case is to pretend that he isn’t aware of exactly where this is going. But he knows what she’s going to say and can’t help but tense up in preparation for the blow he knows she’ll deal him.

She hums in response. “Well, for this particular mission, I had to wear perfume.” They are nearing the door of her quarters, a one-bedroom apartment Tsunade had given her to stay in during diplomatic visits. She turns to look at him. Her voice is like a kunai dripping with poison, but her eyes twinkle a little. “Imagine my surprise when you came strolling around the corner,” she leans in close enough that he can feel her breath against the side of his neck, “with the scent of hydrangeas on you.” 

Goosebumps form on every inch of Shikamaru’s exposed skin and he takes a step back, feeling a little impressed, a little turned on, but mostly mortified. He lets the information sink in that he never stood a chance keeping anything private from her. Then something else crosses his mind: had her feelings been hurt? 

Then, seeing the hint of a smirk dancing in the corner of her mouth, he realizes that she’s teasing him again. She’s not mad or upset. Why would she be? What business would it be of hers where he put his dick? Sure, a girl his age might be scandalized, but for all he knows, maybe she’s met eyes with some man from across the room somewhere and found herself pinned against a wall by his cock. Shikamaru’s mouth goes dry at the thought, though he knows not all sexual encounters go the way his had gone today and he’s only imagining her getting fucked in a broom closet because his point of reference is small. His face reddens just a little, but he decides to take her teasing it in good humor. 

“They say if your first instinct after the act is to shower, you don’t really like the person,” she says once his expression shifts from horrified to amused. 

“That’s not true,” he says, ducking his head a little to look at her head-on, and grinning impishly. “I didn’t get to know her well enough to decide if I liked her or not.” 

Temari is surprised by his admission but soon throws her head back in laughter. She wipes away a tear from her eye as her laughter subsides, and Shikamaru can’t help but admire the way she looks in the golden light of the setting sun. 

She opens the door to her apartment, and turns her head to beam at him. “Well you should probably try not to do that too often. You might get a reputation.” 

She disappears into her apartment and he turns around to walk home, feeling relief from heartache for the first time since Asuma was gone.


	3. Chapter 3

She opens her front door in the morning an hour after sunrise, and sees his lanky form leaning against the wall of a fruit stand that has yet to open for the day. Seeing her, he pushes off. His face is unreadable, angular and handsome. 

“Not too hungover, are we?” Temari asks, trying to banish any and all thoughts of attraction about someone the age of her baby brother. 

“Considering I can’t show my face in _that_ bar ever again…” he trails off, then starts coughing uncomfortably. “I, uh, went straight home.” 

Temari knows better than to try to get intel out of a member of the Nara clan, so linked are they with the Yamanakas, who are experts in intelligence and psychic warfare. It’s her luck that he is comfortable enough to slip up around her. She files away what he said in her brain, knowing that he is praying that he would simply ignore his accidental comment. 

She is aware that he might, possibly be attracted to her, but she’s a strong and beautiful kunoichi with powerful political influence. She is used to men lusting after her. What she isn’t used to is the type of honesty that Shikamaru had shown her the night before. She has confronted possible suitors before when she’s caught them red-handed, and she is used to the indignant denial and excuses that they provide. She shakes her head. She wasn’t vetting him as a potential suitor last night, she reminds herself. She was distracting him, teasing him, and cheering him up. She did the same for her brothers when they all lost their father. She wasn’t allowed to grieve back then. She forced herself, at 15, to grow up and carry all the pain of her brothers. To harden herself for their sake. Her own suffering had never shown.

She glances at the teenager next to her. She’s never been with someone younger than her. She thinks about her last lover, a quiet 25-year-old ANBU guard of hers. It was forbidden love, and maybe that’s what kept it going as long as it did. But she let it slip that she thought he was bad at his job for getting his emotions involved in his assignment, and there was a new mask among her guard the next day. She didn’t know if it was a romantic gesture that he had asked to be reassigned or if it was a breakup. She wasn’t wrong about what she said, and she didn’t respect him any more for leaving. An ANBU who falls in love so easily? An ANBU who shed his kunai at her bedroom door as he knelt down on her bed to fuck her, her fans right on the nightstand, ready to kill him if needed? A shinobi who trusts that easily was a chink in the armor of her guard. 

She doesn’t have ANBU following her in Konoha. Just the kid next to her who’s clearly distracted by his own mourning. In fact, he looks so lost in thought that she forms the hypothesis that if she were to throw a shuriken at this short range, then he might not catch it. She tests her hypothesis, and is surprised by how quickly his hand shoots up to catch it between his two fingers. 

“What the fuck, Temari?” Shikamaru asks, irritated but mostly unphased. 

“Just making sure you were paying attention.” 

“I’m not particularly well-read on diplomatic law,” he says, his annoyance melting into amusement as he spins the blade between his two fingers, “but I’m pretty sure that this counts as an act of war.” 

“Darn,” Temari answers, her hands on her hips. She turns to look him in the eye, putting on a pensive face. “How should we break the news to our respective Kage?” 

“Well, _I’m_ going to tell our respective Kage that the only princess of Suna, who I was entrusted to escort through my village, attacked me without provocation and without the counsel of her nation,” he said, leaning in just a little too close as he spoke. “I don’t know what _you’re_ going to tell them.” 

She feels her pulse quicken as she looks, stupidly, at his grin. She hates that she just found his litigiousness sexy, and then blushes deeply when she realizes that she thought of someone three years younger than her as sexy. Struggling to gain the upperhand, she steadies herself and leans closer to him than he had initially gotten. Her lips travel a centimeter away from his high cheekbones to his ear. 

“Isn’t there something we can work out, just the two of us, Shika?” Her voice is low and husky, and if she were honest with herself, it's too early in the morning to play these kinds of games. He freezes in place and her lips linger where they are as she waits a beat. Savoring her win, she delivers the death blow. “Like buying you a cup of coffee?” Temari gestures to the door they have been standing in front of during this entire conversation. It had been her destination to begin with, as she hasn’t been given her assignment yet, and knows that Tsunade wouldn’t give it to her until noon or later. Her plan had been to get some coffee and something to eat and then return to her quarters to work on some paperwork. She pulls the door open and leads her companion inside. 

“You can smoke here,” she says, gesturing to the back of the cafe. “What do you want for breakfast?” 

His mouth is still open, staring at her. He shakes his head as if to gain composure. “You aren’t going to lecture me about health risks?”

“What am I, your mother?” 

“No, you’re much worse. Black coffee is fine,” he says mildly, as if nothing has just happened, and picks up an ashtray at the counter. He lopes to the smoking section in the back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coffee shop is based off of Doutor, a chain in Japan where I spent many jet lagged mornings this past October while in Tokyo. You can smoke indoors in a lot of them.


	4. Chapter 4

He is reading the free newspaper in the back of the cafe, trying to focus on a story about the Daimyō as he smokes an entire cigarette in two drags. He sits cross-legged in the booth staring at the words, not really comprehending them, and trying not to think himself in circles again. 

Just ten minutes earlier, he’d been thinking about Asuma’s voice. He would never again hear his gravelly chuckle, never appreciate the way he spoke precisely around Shikamaru in a way that conveyed that the sensei understood his student. He wouldn’t ever hear clumsy metaphors with valuable lessons. He would never be _seen_ the way Asuma saw him again. The Nara clan has a few things they are known for: medicinal knowledge, deer, and the bonds with the Akimichi and the Yamanaka clans. His father was an anomaly in his genius, and Shikamaru had hoped that no one would notice him in his laziness. No one did for the first twelve years of his life. 

Asuma saw him instantly. All of him. He saw Shikamaru’s flaws, he saw Shikamaru’s talents, he saw how to tease out what was good in his student and he watched with an amused expression as Shikamaru’s shortcomings--his sexism, his cruelty, his sloth--came to bite him in the ass until he turned his opinions around. Asuma didn’t just know how to teach Shikamaru, he believed in Shikamaru. That rang evident when Asuma told his student to teach his yet unborn child. He thought about Kurenai and the baby that he would protect with his life. This child would never hear Asuma’s voice, that gravelly chuckle. So much for not thinking himself in circles. 

He had been swallowing back tears when he saw a blade nearing his temple, distracting him temporarily. Presently, though, he was worrying the lighter with his fingers, chainsmoking, and making himself nauseous with either grief or nicotine poisoning. 

Temari sits down across from him, placing a pastry and a cup of coffee in front of him. 

“Eat this,” she says, raising her own black coffee to her lips. No sugar, no milk. He doesn’t know why but he finds it comforting that they take their coffee the same way. 

“Do you want children?” Shikamaru asks casually as he takes a single bite of the pastry in front of him. He doesn’t really taste it, chewing and swallowing without enjoyment. The only time he had made himself have a proper meal was before his fight with Hidan, when he knew he needed the strength. His appetite had been nonexistent lately. 

Temari nearly chokes on her drink in surprise, then laughs. “What?” 

“Just thinking about something Asuma said to me.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want. I carry the blood of Rasa in my veins. Any child I bear is eligible to be Kazekage, and therefore it is my duty to have children” Her response is automatic, and he realizes this is something she’s probably said a thousand times. 

“I’m not asking you for the official policy on succession,” he answers.

“Sorry. I’ve attended one too many meetings about this exact subject.” She fidgets for a moment, something he’d never seen her do. “If I were a different person, yes. I would want one child, I think.” 

“Does it bother you that your fate is decided?” 

“Your fate is just as decided as mine. Are you bothered?” 

Shikamaru considers this for a moment. He used to want an easy, simple life. He had tried to shrug greatness off his shoulders. A seat at the table of the Konoha Council, where he’d be required to attend long meetings and sway the idiotic Daimyō in one direction or another, had once seemed like such a drag. He almost laughs as he remembers when he tried to sleep through the invasion that the woman sitting in front of him had helped carry out. He hadn’t yet fully developed his sense of duty to the village back then. Asuma had changed all that, had shown him the Will of Fire. Shikamaru was to be the next head of the Nara clan. He would inherit his father’s responsibilities, have a child around the same time as Ino and Choji to continue the InoShikaCho tradition, and he would teach Asuma’s child. Not only will he do all of these things, he _wants_ to. 

“No,” he says after a few minutes of silent thinking, then goes to take a drag of his cigarette. When he senses resistance in the pull and doesn’t feel the sear in the back of his throat, he realizes his cigarette has gone out. He frowns and, not liking the taste of relit ones, pulls out a new one. 

Temari has been watching. “You need a fucking nap,” she says, gesturing to the half-smoked cigarette he’d placed in the ash tray. “You look like shit.” 

“Thanks,” he says, knowing that underneath her gruffness is genuine concern. He stands as if to usher her back to her apartment. She was just about to suggest they leave, and is pleased that he can anticipate her wants and needs like this. “You look great, by the way.” He means it, but his tone is flippant. He wonders what it would be like to tell a woman that he found her beautiful in earnest.

Shikamaru squints in the golden sunlight of the early morning outside of the cafe. They make their way to her apartment in silence, his head aching a little from the lack of food and steady dose of nicotine. When they reach her door, she turns to him. 

“Go home and lay down for two and half hours. I noticed some meadowsweet in your garden. Pull it up and chew on the root of that. Put a cold cloth over your eyes. Come back here before noon. If Tsunade notices how bad you look, she’s going to take you off the mission and assign some fucking halfwit drip,” she orders. 

He groans in displeasure despite the warmth he feels in his belly at the implication that he is her favorite escort. “Do I look like a kunoichi? Boys aren’t given flower classes.” That is just the first of his complaints, but he waits for her to counter. 

“Just have your mom help you. My God, what do you do if you’re on a team with all men and one of you is injured? Just suffer?” Temari’s hand is on her doorknob and her head is turned away, but he hears her mutter the word _helpless_ under her breath and he smiles a little. 

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re bossy?” Shikamaru asks, a little amused.

“No one who’s survived,” she says, looking over her shoulder to wink at him. With that, she opens the door and leaves him in the street.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the comments on the previous chapter. I had been questioning whether anyone was actually reading this!

As a general rule, Temari dislikes men from Konoha romantically. As a general rule, men from Konoha feel the same way about her. She doesn’t quite match with the standard of beauty in the village. She is sitting cross-legged in her quarters reading paperwork, but glances down at the scars that fleck her upper thighs, raised and lighter than her skin tone. She doesn’t attribute stories to them. She doesn’t assign sentimental value to a particularly large one on her sternum and she doesn’t pay any attention to little nips the kunai have given her over the years. When she was sixteen or so, she made the mistake of trying to hook up with a chunin around her age. She’d been in Konoha, ironically enough, to save Shikamaru’s ass. 

The chunin, whose name she forgot or maybe never committed to memory in the first place, had pawed at her breasts over her clothes and covered her mouth with his messily. She’d shrugged out of her shirt, and when his hands ran over her back, he broke their kiss. She sensed something wrong and looked at him inquisitively. 

“You know, we have some of the best medical ninjas in the world. They can heal your scars.” 

“They can, can they?” Temari had asked, brushing her thumb over a mark on his collarbone. “What’s this, then? Looks like they missed a spot.” 

“I meant because you’re a girl, so you can be pretty,” he said. She stiffened underneath his touch and he immediately backpedalled with sputtering, stupid _of course you’re already pretty_ s and _I mean, do I prefer soft girls? Yes, but I really like you!_ s. Reassurances she didn’t need or want, because she wasn’t insecure about her skin at all. Her first thought was that the village was simply full of sexists. Her second was that she’d saved one of those sexists today, and when her skirt had ridden up as she sat across from him and she saw his eyes drift down to where her thighs stuck together, he hadn’t seemed disgusted by her scar tissue. Certainly not interested in her lecture, but perhaps interested in looking at her. 

“My body count today,” she said too-sweetly to the boy in front of her, “is not zero. And I have no qualms about raising it.” 

She hadn’t seen a Konoha boy run so fast, not even for a mission. She pulled her shirt back on, but not before touching the spot on her back where the boy had had his hand. It was barely blemished. She wondered what he would have thought if she’d undone the binding around her chest, revealing the angry lesion that runs an imperfect diagonal line between the bottom of her clavicle, between her breasts, and to the top of her ridge cage. 

“Weakling,” she’d said out loud, though he was already gone.


	6. Chapter 6

He hadn’t realized that he’d been carrying tension in his jaw, his shoulders, and his buttocks. He had grown accustomed to the throbbing feeling in his heart and the ache in his temples. Pain was his new normal. He had been in pain emotionally, and consequently, physically. 

Now, with a small piece of root clenched in his teeth, he recognizes the pleasure of his head _not_ pounding and the peace that comes when one is without pain. 

“You look better,” he hears her say, and he opens his eyes. He’d been basking in physical relief, leaning against the wall of the same fruit stand he’d been leaning against this morning. She continues past him and he peels himself from his position to follow her. 

“Thanks,” he says, watching her walk a few paces in front of him, eyes taking her figure in quickly so as not to leer, and keeping the image in his head as he catches up to her, staring straight ahead. “You know, my mom loves that you made me ask her for help. She made a meal out of making me ask politely for her assistance.” 

“Hmm,” she answers warmly, “judging by the looks of it, you managed to be polite. I’d pay to see that.” 

“How much? Because I’ve recently taken up a very expensive habit and could use some extra money,” he answers, lighting a cigarette as they walk for emphasis. 

He has to put it out prematurely, though, because they swiftly approach their destination.

“I see you already know your assignment,” Tsunade says to Shikamaru as the two enter the Hokage’s office. 

“Yes, My Lady. My assignment made herself very conveniently known yesterday afternoon,” he answers as he side-eyes the woman next to him. 

“Lady Hokage, it’s an honor once again. Thank you for assigning me the very best the village has to offer,” Temari says, returning the side-eye. 

Tsunade’s eyes narrow, and she begins flipping through a book of chunin on her desk. “Shall I assign you a new escort, then?” 

“No,” they both say in unison, too quickly and too insistently. Tsunade’s eyes remain narrow. 

“Very well,” she says. “Shikamaru, your presence isn’t needed for the remainder of the meeting.” 

This is unusual, but he doesn’t protest and slinks out to stand with the ANBU outside the door. He has a well trained ear, but the doors are thick. A few minutes later, Temari opens the door with a thick stack of papers in hand, and he follows behind. 

“Is there anything I’m not supposed to escort you to? Any days you don’t want me to show up for?” Shikamaru asks, expecting something in the mission to be above his pay grade. 

“No, just your typical diplomacy stuff. Actually, I’d like you to look over some of these and tell me what you think,” she answers, waving the papers she’s carrying. 

“Then what was that about?” 

“What? Oh, you leaving? She thought something untoward might be happening. I set the record straight,” she says, laughing. 

“Huh,” he says. He felt the sexual tension in their exchanges and felt an attraction to her, but had never thought others could pick up on it, let alone make the conclusion that they were sleeping together. As if he could pull a princess, an older woman who knew his age, a woman who he couldn’t imagine being vulnerable for even a moment. He imagines normal sex, people undressing one another all the way down, laying atop a bed together. Where did Temari put her fans in such a situation? Within reach? Where would a man put his kunai? 

He becomes aware of her stare and looks her in the eye. “I suppose we get along well,” he offers. She nods, and he’s pleased with himself for acting so cool.

Nearing her apartment, Temari turns to look at him. “Come in with me,” she says. “I have so much work to do. You have to help.” 

She opens the door and, for the first time, he doesn’t watch her disappear. He follows her into the undecorated space. There’s furniture he recognizes as issued by the village, but other than that, the apartment is devoid of personality. 

“Haven’t you been staying here for at least a year?” Shikamaru asks. 

“Should I lug some momentos with me from Suna? Should I spend the tax dollars of my people on decorations?” 

“Practical,” he says, almost admiringly. He sits on a cushion and picks up the stack of papers she’d been trying to get through earlier in the day. She is gone for a few minutes and returns in silk pajamas. 

“I think better when I’m comfortable,” she explains, and he notices the swing of her unbound breasts as she sits down across from him. 

“It’s your home,” he says, suddenly very interested in the papers in front of him. 

She focuses on hers as well. After half an hour, he looks up and notices that one of the buttons on her shirt has come undone. She notices his gaze and he covers quickly. 

“Do you want coffee? I can walk down to that place…” 

“We have too much work. Check the fridge.” 

He opens the door of the refrigerator to find cold-brewed coffee in a large bottle with the cafe’s logo on it. “Ugh.” 

“I like it hot, too. This is the best I can do given our time constraint,” she calls. He rolls his eyes and grabs the bottle, then opens the cabinet to get two glasses. It’s a well-stocked liquor cabinet, and he closes the doors, shuffling to open the next one.

“I didn’t realize you were a lush,” he says jokingly, echoing her words from the day before. He finds the correct cabinet, grabbing two glasses. 

“That’s more for Konkurō, when he comes to the village with me. And guests,” she says, absorbed in whatever she was reading. 

“Oh, you entertain much?” Shikamaru inquires amusedly as he returns to the living room. She didn’t have many friends in the village that he knew of, and even then, she didn’t seem like the type to host a soiree. In fact, he found the idea of the cruelest kunoichi inviting people into her home, making them drinks and engaging in small talk, to be absurd. 

She chuckles softly as if enjoying a private joke. “Not recently.” 

He sets the glasses on the table and pours coffee in each of them, trying not to look at her lest he notice the way the fabric of her shirt strains around her full breasts, take in the shape of her legs as she sits studying whatever paper was in front of her, or notice the way her lips move ever so slightly when she’s reading to herself and ache to brush aside a strand of hair that has come loose over her face. He doesn’t quite understand this mix of tenderness and sexual desire, and so he tries not engage with it until he has more time to think about its implications. She’ll be gone in a week’s time and he won’t have to deal with these troublesome feelings anymore.

And once Temari is gone, he will settle back into the quiet, unsettling reality that is Konoha without Asuma. He’ll find another civilian woman to fuck, and then another, and he’ll try not to be so bad at it the second or third time, and he’ll try not to close his eyes and imagine he’s fucking someone else. He’ll run his fingers over her unblemished skin and be bored by it, watch her small hands unbutton his chunin vest and try not to wish the hands were larger, coarser, tanner, with scars on the knuckles and calluses on the fingers. He hazards a look at Temari and feels some kind of new pain in his heart. It’s raw and agonizing and he realizes that he has it bad. He rubs the back of his neck, looking up at the ceiling, both annoyed at himself for being in pain because of his yearning instead of being in pain because of grief and annoyed that he yearns at all.


	7. Chapter 7

“I need a plant you don’t have to water more than four times a year,” he says casually to Ino, leaning against the counter of her flower shop. 

“Not even you are that lazy,” she says, not bothering to even look up from her magazine, much less pretend to find a plant for him. 

“It’s not for me.”

“Oh?” Ino’s interest is piqued. “Most girls would prefer a bouquet.” 

“Are you going to help me or not?” Shikamaru asks, pulling a cigarette out of the pack and holding it between his middle and forefinger. 

“You can’t smoke in here. Hang on,” she says, disappearing somewhere before returning with a few small potted plants. 

“Here are some plants from _Suna_ ,” she nearly sings that last word, and he snaps his cigarette between his fingers by accident. There is color in his cheeks as he tries to control his embarrassed grimace. 

“Thought so,” she says, pleased, setting the plants in front of him. 

“Just pick something a girl would like,” he says, rolling his eyes. 

“That’s not very romantic,” she says, sticking out her lower lip. 

“I’m not trying to be romantic.” 

“In that case, you should go for the flowering cactus. Giving it to a woman indicates your sexual desire for her,” she says, howling with laughter.

“I’m leaving,” he sighs, heading towards the door. 

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Shika! I’ll help, I swear,” she manages to get out, trying to calm herself. 

“The woman only has village-issued furniture. Adding a plant she can’t kill to living quarters that look like an asylum is just humane.”

“So you’ve been inside?” Ino grins. 

“Troublesome,” he says, putting down some money and a scrap of paper. “Here’s the address. Just pick something and deliver it to her.” 

“Shall I write a card? ‘Dearest Temari, Princess of my Heart, I long to hold y--’,” she was suddenly paralyzed, Shikamaru having used shadow possession to stop her mid-sentence. 

“Just write ‘For the Sake of the Taxpayers,’” he says, releasing the jutsu and leaving. 

It’s past sundown and Temari sips sake alone, having dismissed Shikamaru hours ago. She feels foolish. She had invited him in under the guise of work, planning to gauge his reaction to her and see if she should pursue a physical relationship. She’d changed into silk, and undid the top button after a few minutes. He didn’t look at her the entire afternoon, and she sensed a deep discomfort in him. When she’d told Shikamaru that she didn’t need his help for the remainder of the evening, he practically ran out of her house. It was probably for the best. He was too young for her, and it would be inconvenient to find a new escort when things went south. Plus, Tsunade had made it painfully clear that she would disapprove of such a thing. She should have known that he wouldn’t be receptive to the offer. He was professional, dedicated to his mission. She would have to find someone more appropriate to relieve her dry spell with. 

She hears someone outside her apartment, and, not immediately recognizing the chakra, swings her door open to see a surprised Ino, holding a potted plant. 

“Delivery from the Yamanaka Flower Shop,” Ino says, bowing. 

“Bring it in, then,” Temari says, examining the arrangement of succulents. She opens the card and snickers. “That’s funny.” 

“Is it?” Ino says critically, looking around the undecorated apartment. Ino had assumed that Shikamaru was exaggerating, but the walls are bare and there are no personal items anywhere. 

“Odd that he’d get me something, though,” she says, mainly to herself, as she places the ceramic pot on the table, considers its position, and moves it a little to the left. 

“Is it?” Ino repeats.

“I’m sure you have other deliveries,” Temari says and motions towards the door to dismiss her, and Ino would be offended if she didn’t know that Temari was naturally brusque. 

She exits, walking a block and a half before calling out, “You aren’t as sneaky as you think, you know.” 

Shikamaru groans and comes into view. “What gave me away?” 

“I’d like to think I know you pretty well,” she answers. In truth, it was just a lucky guess. Ino could imagine Shikamaru calculating every outcome of the situation, and, getting fed up thinking about the two or three most likely scenarios, deciding to just go over there and observe. “I genuinely can’t tell if she likes you or not. Is she always that terse?” 

“Yeah. Sometimes she’s a downright bitch,” he answers, trying and failing to keep a dreamy tone out of his voice. Ino notices and giggles. 

“What’re you doing now? Do you want to get Choji and grab dinner?” Shikamaru asks, trying to change the subject. 

“Finally dragging yourself out of isolation?” Ino asks pleasantly as they continue walking. “Yeah, I could eat.”


	8. Chapter 8

Girls like him. They’ve liked him since he became a chunin, really, and they especially flock to him after Asuma dies. He doesn’t think he’s particularly good-looking, but he’s aloof and, girls assume, tortured by the tragic death of his sensei. They try to fix him, unravel his past. They saddle up to him with timid blushes and inane promises to keep his secrets. But there is nothing to fix and he doesn’t harbor darkness in his heart. Besides, he isn’t interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with any of the kunoichi who bat their eyelids and ask Ino if her friend is single. He is interested, whoever, in sex. But girls his age only have sex when they’re in love. 

So he finds himself in some woman’s studio apartment on the outskirts of the village, spending the afternoon with his head between her thighs. It isn’t the first time he’s been with this woman, but he knows that pretty soon she’ll start asking about his personal life and he’ll have to let her off easy and find a new paramour. He’d been going for pale women, shorter ones with silky, dark hair, with artisan jobs who only recognized the Nara name in passing. Women who were very much unlike the woman he’d been successful at keeping out of his mind.

“Please, fuck me, Shika,” she cries out beneath him.

“Keep begging,” he growls, his voice muffled by her apex. He inserts a finger, then two, and feels her tighten around his digits. When he thinks she’s about to come, he moves up and gently bites her earlobe. Lining himself up with her entrance, he pushes in slowly. He hears her gasp as he does so and smiles to himself. What he likes most about sleeping around is that each woman likes things differently, and it’s always a puzzle. And he really, really enjoys puzzles. 

When all is said and done, after he hands her a cloth to wipe the mess between her legs, he pulls on his trousers. There’s a cigarette dangling at the edge of his lips, ready to be lit as soon as he walks out the door. 

“You’re welcome to stay the night,” she says, tying a robe around her from her seated position on the futon. 

“I have a mission summons tomorrow,” he answers as lightly as he can, and tucks the cigarette behind his ear so he can bend down and kiss her on the lips. “Otherwise I would.” The last sentence is a lie, but he figures it’s best to keep things on an even keel. 

He takes off into the early evening and can’t help but notice the floral smell on him. She probably wouldn’t have minded if he’d used her shower, but for some reason that seemed more intimate than swirling his tongue between around her core until she can’t take it another second.  
He lights the cigarette that he’d been looking forward to and takes a drag, savoring the flavor and relief he feels at having his craving satisfied. He is full-blown addicted now, smoking one cigarette when he wakes and one every subsequent hour of his waking day. He has one after every meal and after every sexual encounter. He can sense the shortness of breath he feels when he has to be quick during missions, and he itches for a fix when he must be covert and the scent of tobacco would give him away. 

He has more or less laid off the drink, save for the random celebration when Choji or Ino had snuck a glass or two of something and they share it in secret, smiling at one another conspiratorially and bonding in the harmless teenage disobedience of having a few sips liquor. His only bad habits, really, are the women and the smoking, and only Temari knew about the former, because he’d been quite careful since she had caught him a few months ago. He had been trying not to think about her since she left the village, and the name crossing his mind causes his pulse to quicken and his stomach to drop. 

A few weeks ago, he’d heard her name out loud from one of the jōnins he’d been teamed with for a three-day B-ranked mission. They’d all been shooting the shit before turning in for the night when this shinobi mentioned his buddy in the ANBU who fucked the princess of Suna. He’d been at once curious and abhorred. Who was this ANBU member? What had he done to be in such a position? At the same time, he felt like he was being given knowledge he shouldn’t have. And in the very pit of his stomach was an ugly emotion that he did not recognise. It felt like an angry regret and tasted bitter in his mouth. It was illogical, and he disliked the illogical. It was jealousy. 

He had pulled a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. Just as he did the jōnin clapped him on the back, causing him to cough on the exhale, making the relief he should have felt in smoking painful instead. 

“He said she was crazy in the sack. We don’t have to tell you, though, right, Shikamaru?” 

He was wheezing, shocked at the insinuation and the burning in his lungs. “I don’t go for kunoichis,” he choked out. It was technically true, he’d exclusively slept with civilians. It was strategic, mostly because if his mom or Ino found out about his extracurricular activities, he would be murdered. 

“Come on,” his comrade said. A few of the others murmured in agreement. “I heard that she requests you as her escort every time she’s in the village.” 

“What happened to your buddy?” Shikamaru asked, partially to change the subject and partially because he wanted to know if Temari killed him for his loose lips or if he’d have to do it himself. ANBU aren’t supposed to discuss their missions. In order to say you slept with the princess of Suna, first you would have to say that your mission was to guard the princess of Suna, and that was a serious breach in security. 

“He asked to get reassigned. Apparently, she’s a huge bitch. He didn’t even break up with her, he just ghosted her,” the jōnin laughed. Shikamaru chuckled, too, but for different reasons. Anyone who thought that they were in control of the situation around Temari was gravely mistaken and anyone who found her curt mannerisms to be a dealbreaker was a fool. 

“What’d she do?” Shikamaru probed, letting his emotions get the better of him. If it had been anyone else, he’d have gone to bed. The sex lives of dignitaries did not interest him, and he knew better than start interpersonal conflicts with comrades. He had to trust this man with his life, and there he was, giving himself a reason to detest his teammate. 

“She told him he was a shitty shinobi. The next day he was back here.” 

“Isn’t the fact that you know all this,” Shikamaru said carefully, “Proof that she was right?” 

There was silence around the fire before the jōnin sent out a booming laugh. “You _are_ fucking her!” 

Shikamaru stood. “I’m going to bed,” he said. Temari didn’t need him to defend her honor, and he didn’t need to get involved in whatever stupid gossip his comrades were taking part of. 

When he had knelt down in his tent, he ripped scrap of paper out of the book the book was reading and grabbed a pen. 

“Heard about an ANBU that got close to you. We are only as strong as our weakest point.” 

He’d sealed it in an envelope and sent it to her after he completed the mission. He didn’t sign his name, but his family seal would be on the postage and he knew she was smart enough to figure it out. A week later, he heard from the same jōnin that his buddy got assigned to be the escort of a distant, elderly relative of the Daimyō. It was a career death sentence to be the lone babysitter of a distant relative of a Fire politician in some far off village. You’d never be reassigned. The Daimyō, a milquetoast idiot, loved to have ANBU guarding his family. The more Konoha could spare, the better. 

He smiles, thinking about Temari’s wrath regarding the man who betrayed her. He doesn’t feel bad about it. An ANBU who talked so freely is a significant liability. It was for the safety of his village that he sent her that note. 

He collapses into bed, imagining her angry face and the dangerous look in her eyes when she’s about to deal a death blow. It’s beautiful and frightening, ugly and intriguing. He likes how terrifying she is, even when he’s on the receiving end of her fury. As he falls asleep, he pictures her messy hair and suntanned skin and thinks about how it would feel if he were brave enough to reach out and run his thumb over her lower lip, to run his tongue over the scar he noticed snaking through her cleavage, drag his teeth gently across her breasts, to grasp her in hips in his hands. To get close enough to her that she fucking hurts him because he knows he would never make it out unscathed. He knows that if he ever touched her, it would be over for him. He would never recover from her. He’d never be able to touch another woman. He would never see anything as lovely or as brutal as her with her with fans splayed, surer than he’d ever be, ready to kill and unafraid of being killed. He would follow her into battle, he’d follow her off a cliff, he’d follow her to certain death. 

When he wakes, he pulls the bedding off his futon to wash it. He steps into the shower, scrubbing off the flowers and the pheromones, gets dressed, and strolls to the Hokage’s office. On his way, he sees Naruto, gazing downward and appearing ill. 

He is told of the death of Tsunade’s former teammate and Naruto’s sensei and tasked with decoding his final message. He wonders if it’s better or worse that Naruto didn’t get to say goodbye. Watching the life fade from Asuma’s eyes as Shikamaru calculated his chances of survival, slim but existent and getting slimmer with each passing second, was the hardest thing he had ever done. Naruto isn’t the type to consider such things. He speculates that Naruto won’t overanalyze or self-medicate, the way Shikamaru had. 

But he recognizes the emptiness in Naruto’s voice when he comes to ask for help in deciphering the code because he, too, had felt that same emptiness not long ago. When Asuma had died, it had felt like a piece of Shikamaru had died, too. He would play Shogi by himself and expect Asuma to approach and sit across from him before remembering that they would never play another against each other again. He would sometimes let his mind wander and head towards Asuma’s home out of habit, rounding the corner near the house and expecting to see him strolling with Kurenai. When he would realize what he was doing and remembered that Asuma wasn’t there, he’d sigh heavily and redirect his course. 

Naruto can’t seem to focus on anything. He doesn’t look like he’s eaten or left his bed, and Shikamaru now knows what Temari must have seen all those months ago. He almost smiles fondly as _you look like shit_ echoes in his head. He drags his friend out of bed and tells him about the future of the village. Senseis die, but they do not disappear from the minds of their students. Shikamaru is no longer the disaffected, immature boy that Asuma had met. He had taken Shikamaru and molded him into a man, and someday Shikamaru would mold Asuma’s child into a perfect shinobi. The cycle would continue and the Will of Fire would be passed on to a new generation, and someday there would be a generation of children born who do not need to know how to fight, a generation of children whose senseis die of old age, surrounded by loved ones, instead of painfully in front of their students. He wishes that someone had told him from the start how healing it is to work towards a peaceful future.


	9. Chapter 9

Temari’s desk is in the Kazekage’s office. She had been offered an office of her own, of course, but square footage in Suna was hard to come by and in truth, she could work anywhere. It had been Gaara’s suggestion, and he sensed her quiet pleasure in being included in his day-to-day work. She is sitting at her desk when a secretary places an unusually thin envelope in front of her. She examines it, noting the Nara clan seal on the postmark. 

Inside is the title page torn from a book called _Analytic Tradecraft: The Geopolitics of Intelligence_. She rolls her eyes. Not that there had been any question before, but this is definitely Shikamaru’s work. In handwriting more elegant than she would have expected is the message: _Heard about an ANBU that got close to you. We are only as strong as our weakest point._ She lets out a noise. 

“What is it?” Gaara asks, his voice sounding detached despite his interest. Very little rattled his sister. 

“I have to put out a fire in Konoha. Send word to Lady Tsunade that I’ll be coming and that I’d prefer my arrival to be covert.” She stands and exits, trying to remain as calm as possible, but her mind is racing. That motherfucker. She was going to bury that ninja so deep that not even an Earth style user would be able to find him. 

As for Shikamaru, she wonders if he thinks less of her now. What she’d done hadn’t been against the rules, technically. It had been unprofessional, but it wasn’t as though it’d been an abuse of power. She hadn’t been his boss. The only power she had over him was social power, and she has that over every shinobi in the world who isn’t directly related to her. What’s more, she had genuinely liked the man who had been her lover. It wasn’t like she’d fallen in love or anything, but she found him sweet and capable enough. It hadn’t just been about sex, and that made the betrayal sting a little. 

Shikamaru sending the note is a good sign, she decides. It means he values the security of his village and the alliance between Konoha and Suna above all else. And maybe it means he respects her enough to allow her to get ahead of the situation. And it’s not as though he is without sin. Afterall, she had been the one who’d caught him with a civilian's perfume lingering over him. She thinks about the message again: _We are only as strong as our weakest point._ She likes that, thinks it’s practical and true. She admires how concise he is, that she knows she can trust him. She likes his dark eyes, the high arch of his eyebrows and the way the corner of his lip curls up when they trade quips. And, _fuck_ , she realizes she has a crush on him. 

She makes the trip in nearly half the time, her anger propelling her through the desert and forest. She arrives an hour before dawn and, knowing the Hokage’s penchant for alcohol consumption, figures there’s no point in heading to Lady Tsunade’s office any time before the late morning. She walks to her own apartment, unlocks the door, and blows some dust off her counter. She eyes the succulent arrangement and smiles before catching herself. It wasn’t like he picked out any of the plants. He’d probably just had his pretty friend do it. And it hadn’t been a romantic gesture, it had been more of a joke than anything. Still, she liked having a reminder of her home when she was away. She feels butterflies in her stomach at the thought of Shikamaru and kills them immediately by pinching her arm as hard as she can. 

She steps into the shower and washes off several days’ worth of grime, watching the dirt pool around her feet. The toiletries in her shower are village-issued, just like everything else in her quarters, and they clearly aren’t issued with cultural differences in mind. Suna kunoichis don’t shave, really, or do any grooming that exists simply for the aesthetic, unless they have a honeypot mission. Frankly, the quality of life in Suna was just now getting to the point of people being able to be concerned about their appearances. Despite this, she was issued two disposable razors each and every time she arrived in Konoha. She makes a mental note to mention it to Lady Tsunade while she’s here.

She steps out of the shower, towels off, and gets dressed. She feels good, the way you do after a much-needed cleaning, but she’s starving. She’s only eaten military rations for the last few days, so she strolls down to the cafe a few blocks away in the cool morning air. It’s springtime, and she admires the fragrant air that can only be attributed to blossoms blooming and the world waking up from winter. It doesn’t exist in Suna, and she thinks that she wouldn’t mind living in this village. She sees herself taking a leisurely walk through the empty streets at daybreak, before the hustle and bustle of the village gets started. She can see herself sitting on a porch some summer morning before the heat of the day sets in, sipping a cup of coffee, plotting her next move of the Shogi game she’s playing. She pinches her arm. 

She walks into the cafe, glancing at the ashtrays on the counter. She feels her mouth twitch, threatening to smile, and pinches herself once more. She’s going to return from this trip more bruised than any of her missions that require actual battle. She pays for two coffees and two pastries and heads towards the Nara compound, turning around three or four times before finally deciding it was a stupid idea to go see him. She could go one visit to Konoha without bothering the chunin. Plus, she isn’t sure if he’d bring up the note and frankly the whole affair is a little embarrassing. 

The two coffees she refuses waste make her jittery and impatient, but she waits as long as she can to make her way to Lady Tsunade’s office. 

“I’ll be brief,” Temari says by way of greeting. “Several months ago I had an ANBU in my detail ask to be reassigned. It appears he’s forgotten his nondisclosure agreement.” 

“This is a serious accusation. An assassin could get a hold of your routine,” says the Konoha leader. “Do you have proof?” 

“Nothing solid,” she answers. “But I don’t have to tell you, Lady Tsunade, that a loose-lipped shinobi isn’t just a liability for me. They’re the first to talk when they’re captured.”

“Very well, I’ll conduct an investigation. If your claim is substantiated, action will be taken.” 

Temari nods and makes her way out of the office. She turns the corner and sees a familiar mask in the Hokage tower. She beams at the ANBU member she had once let into her bed. 

She had been a child, eight or nine, when she took her first life in battle. She didn’t have time to think about the action. She’d been been ambushed, afterall. Her kunai flew out of her hand with speed and accuracy that surprised even her. Sure, she had never missed during training. But in the real world, with her adrenaline rushing, was a different matter. Over the years, her pulse calmed when she killed. She no longer had to catch her breath after hitting a vital organ. She never did quite get used to the fear and hopelessness in her enemy’s eyes as they realized that there was no escaping. This time, though, she watches the ANBU member’s face shift from surprise to terror with glee. Her smile only grows wider when she hears him an _I’m so fucked_ from the direction she just came.


	10. Chapter 10

Temari stands diagonally from him as they look up at Gaara’s form in front of the Fourth Division. He’s too aware of her, his eyes drifting to her and studying her shoulder blades, admiring her sturdy thighs before catching himself and focusing his attention back on what’s important. The war is imminent, and Shikamaru doesn’t like his chances of survival. He imagines his name carved on that great stone, his parents visiting it solemnly. Ino placing flowers at his grave and explaining, in annoying detail, what they symbolize. He accepts the reality of the situation but still tries to think of a different set of circumstances that would lead anywhere but here. If he hadn’t let Asuma die, if he’d been able to retrieve Sasuke all those years ago, if he had done something different, would this war be preventable? He shakes his head. This war has been gestating since long before he was born. He sees Temari turn and look at him from his periphery. He returns her gaze, and she smiles and winks. That simple gesture kills him. He finds himself smiling and rolling his eyes despite his stress. 

It isn’t until early evening that he lets his mind wander to the thought of her again. When he dies, will he have regrets? Will he wish he’d told her how he feels? As it stands, he knows his last thought as the life fades from him will be of her.

He parts the canvas flaps of her tent and sees her sitting alone on a cot. There’s two other cots that must belong to her bunkmates, and he nearly turns around. She’s reading something, he’s intruding, and he has work to do, anyway.

“Shikamaru,” she greets, surprised to see him. Her cheeks flush in a way that makes her look healthier than she should be, given their rations and living conditions. He stands there and looks at her like an imbecile. “What is it?” 

He closes the distance between them and tentatively places his mouth on hers. It’s one of the few moments of his life when he’s unsure of himself, when he can’t calculate the outcome or fathom the risks. He pulls away instantly, feeling her tense up and hearing her sharp intake of air. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have.” 

Her face is unreadable and he turns to leave her, thinking his death in battle might not be such a bad thing after all. She reaches out, grabbing his wrist and pulling him back to face her. He looks at her seriously, and she guides his hands slowly to rest at her waist. He recognizes that he’s about to cross the point of no return. But he’s ready to let her ruin him. 

His heart races as he lowers his head just a little to kiss her again, and this time she reciprocates. He’s never kissed anyone this way. His mouth is urgent and he wonders if she can sense how desperately he wants her. He can feel his heart cracking out of his ribcage as she bites his lower lip. Her mouth travels along his jawbone, to his ear, and down to his neck. 

“What do you want?” Shikamaru asks, knowing that at that moment, he would do literally anything she asked. 

“What do _I_ want?” Temari says against his neck. Her hands snake under his shirt and he shivers beneath her fingertips. “You’re the one who came in here with an agenda.” She pushes her hips forward so his hardness rests against her pubic bone and lightly grinds herself against him. 

He groans and decides to stop holding back. He’s already shown her his hand. She surely felt his anguish in their kiss. She must be aware of her effect on him. 

“If we do this,” he says, “I’m going to fall in love with you.” 

She jerks her head back in surprise and studies his eyes. He keeps his brow furrowed, looking back at her earnestly. And suddenly she’s laughing. 

“So serious,” she says. “Isn’t this supposed to be fun?” 

“Fun? This is torture,” he murmurs, bringing his lips back to her mouth and running his tongue over hers. She breaks the kiss to lift her shirt, and then takes off his as well. He walks her backwards to the cot and lays atop her, his left hand propping him up while his right hand strokes her breast over her sports bra. She makes a noise in the back of her throat and rubs his thumb over her erect nipple and he continues their kiss, his tongue moving in sync with hers. 

He moves his hand south from her breasts and puts his fingers into the waistband of her pants, tugging on them. Temari arches her back, and he’s able to pull them all the way down. She sits up and rubs the bulge in his pants, and he looks at her dangerously before pushing her back down and yanking her boyshorts down with his teeth. Once they’re off, he parts her legs and dips his tongue past her curls, circling her clitoris. He likes the way she tastes, somehow bitter and sweet at the same time. He hears a moan escape her lips and he looks up with a grin on his face. 

“Careful, or someone will hear us,” he says.

“Don’t get cocky,” she says, but her breath is labored as he returns his mouth to her core. She tries to stifle a sob as he runs his middle finger through her slit and inserts it, his thumb gently brushing the bundle of nerves above her entrance. She’s wet as hell. He smirks at her, shaking his head admonishingly. 

She narrows her eyes at his smug expression and grabs his hair to pull him to eye level with her. She hooks her legs around his torso and maneuvers to be on top. She undoes his pants and pulls them and his boxers down aggressively and in one motion, watching as he springs free. She kisses her way down the dark trail of hair that leads to his cock, and once she reaches it, she swirls the head in her mouth, making eye contact with him. She looks up and takes his entire length in his mouth, causing him to cry out. 

“Oh, fuck, Temari,” he says as she runs her tongue down the underside of his shaft. 

“Careful, or someone will hear us,” she chides from her position. She crawls up to straddle him, and strokes him as she hovers over his groin. Slowly, she lowers herself onto his cockhead and then back up. She does this once, twice, five times until Shikamaru is desperate to bury himself into her. 

“Please,” he whispers horsley, and she finally sits all the way down. His eyes roll into the back of his head at the feeling of her around him. She starts to rock her hips, and as she does, she brings her mouth down to whisper in his ear. 

“You feel so good,” she says, picking up the pace. He opens his eyes to the sight of her riding his cock. He rubs his thumb over one of her erect nipples again, and she reaches down to touch herself. 

There’s something that feels right and good and true about being with her. Something about the way she smells, the color in her cheeks, or the way she looks as she concentrates on top of him that makes him feel whole. He forgets that he came in here to tell her that he loves her. He forgets that he was going to do that only because he was sure he would die. It occurs to him that all of the sex he’d had before had been a performance on his part. He’d been doing everything wrong, sexually, until today. It had never been this organic, this painfully real. He wants to taste her saliva, smell her sweat.

He sits up, his hands cupping her ass, and flips them both so he can be on top. He sucks on her neck and begins fucking her in earnest, and she moans loudly. His hand claps over her mouth and this time they both grin. His strokes become faster and her hand, still making circles on her clit, moves at a more frantic pace. She throws her legs over his shoulders, and the new angle and added tightness practically sends him over the edge. She begins to tense up and spasm, and he knows she’s there right before he hears the words coming out of her mouth. 

“I’m—“ she begins, but cannot finish her sentence. She convulses, biting into his neck in lieu of screaming. The throes of her orgasm nearly push his cock out and he works to maintain a steady rhythm to allow her to ride out the waves of pleasure. 

Once she’s relaxed below him, he grabs onto her hips and fucks her hard and fast. After a few pumps, he feels himself on the brink of release. Her hand snakes around his ass and through his thighs. She pushes up on the space between his testicles and asshole with her thumb. His face shifts from surprise to confusion to bliss as he comes harder than he ever has in his life. He sees stars as he empties himself into her, collapsing and breathing heavy into the crook of her neck. 

After a minute or two, Temari strokes his back. “Thanks, I needed that,” she says. He grunts in acknowledgment, his face remaining against her skin. 

“You’re a witch,” he says, his voice softened by her shoulder. 

She laughs, full-bodied and beautiful. It pushes his softening cock out and he hisses at the sensation. 

“I’m a what?” Temari chokes out, her voice so jovial it makes him smile in spite of himself. 

“You’re a witch. A sex demon. A succubus.”

“You’re such a crybaby,” she answers. Her voice is light and realizes that she’s able to keep so calm in these unstable times because Suna has hardly ever known peace. She has been at war her entire life. She isn’t thinking about dying, she is thinking about surviving. 

The words he spoke earlier enter his mind. _If we do this, I’m going to fall in love with you._ It had been a lie, or course. A half-confession he made because he couldn’t bring himself to be honest with her. In truth, he’d been in love with her since his stupid, drunken eyes saw her standing in the road in front of his house. Maybe even before that. 

“Should I leave? Your bunkmates could be here any moment.” He has never asked a woman if he should leave. Typically, he’s out the door by now. This is new territory for him. 

“I doubt it. They seemed pretty scared of me. I don’t think they’re going to willingly spend time in here.”

“I’m scared of you and I’m here,” he points out. 

“You are, are you?” Temari says, her tone almost proud. 

“Terrified,” he answers, resting back into the crook of her neck and inhaling a smell that was uniquely hers.


	11. Chapter 11

Shikamaru brings the cigarette to his lips and in doing so, smells his fingers. He’s probably disgusting, he thinks, for wishing her scent had lingered on him longer. For wanting to taste her again, wanting to live on top of her, wanting to get so tangled in her messy hair and muscular legs that no one could ever pull him free. 

The sun peaks over the horizon in front of him, turning everything red and beautiful. He wonders, absently, how many more sunrises he’ll witness. Not that he’d seen many willingly throughout his life in the first place. He hadn’t been sleeping well the last few days, the only time he drifted off was atop Temari’s breast the evening before, and she’d woken him up God-knows how much later, saying her bunkmates would be back soon. He had dressed quietly in front of her, not wanting to leave and not wanting to say that out loud. He missed her the second he left and felt pathetic for it. When he laid on his own cot minutes later, he listened to the loud snores of his comrades and stared at the canvas roof of his tent until his vision got grainy. Now, though, he is on his fifth consecutive cigarette and he has noticed that the nicotine truly hits differently when you haven’t slept properly in over a week and know you’ll die soon. 

He hears her approaching from behind, and she sits to his left. He says nothing and keeps his eyes straight ahead. He isn’t sure if he can look at her again in the daylight. He doesn’t know if he can stand to see her painted gold in the sunbeams or look her in the eyes, knowing he’ll pick up flecks of different colors and ache to see them again when they inevitably fight different battles in this war. She puts her hand over his, and he finally looks at her. She does not look back, but they intertwine their fingers. He is okay with the fact that he loves her and won’t live long enough to get her to love him back. This is enough for him for today, staring at the sky this morning with her. 

Not twenty-four hours later, he stares up at the same sky in horror. It’s possible that Shikaku and Inoichi could evacuate. Live to fight another day. Shikamaru doesn’t have all the facts. He doesn’t know where the exits of the building are, how quickly his father can get to them, or if the men could even clear the shockwave. He was never a fan of studying physics, and, as he watches the ball of energy sear through the sky, he comes to the conclusion that it’s probably best that he can’t calculate the force, the velocity, or the fragmentation of such a weapon.

Shikaku, on the other hand, does have all the facts, and decides his time is best spent relaying one last message. When Shikamaru sees that sickening light in the distance, he cannot begrudge his father’s decision. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. He clutches his heart in agony and Ino wipes away a tear. He had been comforted while on the battlefield by the fact that his father was at HQ, thinking he was safe, that he’d survive even if Shikamaru did not. How quickly things change. 

He feels, deep in his marrow, a resolve he had not felt before. It is his duty to endure, to lead, and to show strength in the face of adversity. Even if he only lives for another few hours, he will live those hours bravely.

And when those hours are up, he rests in Choji’s arms. He doesn’t recognize that cadaverous face reflected in the teary eyes of his friends. He is desperately thirsty. He’s freezing. He can feel his heart beating hard and the cold sweat making his clothes stick uncomfortably to his skin. He cannot hear anything but the ringing in his ears and he expects to soon see the silhouettes of Shikaku and Asuma who will greet him into the next life. The pain is receding. His vision fades and the noise becomes louder and louder until there is no noise at all. To think he’d never have a son that’s just like him except he has his mother’s mouth, or his mother’s eyes, or his mother’s fight.


	12. Chapter 12

Konoha believes that comradery is integral to combat. They believe out of war comes the beauty of brotherhood. Or sisterhood. Suna ninjas aren’t so sure about all that. Rasa had taught Temari from a young age to be suspicious of people, and she sees absolutely nothing beautiful when she watches one ninja dive in front of another in an attempt to save him. They both die, and the coppery stench of their blood almost makes her gag. 

She had thought she’d seen it all. She had thought she could no longer be revolted. But her stomach flips when she looks at the thousands of horrible, mangled bodies. So many that no one could hope to know exactly how many casualties this war caused. Every dead man looks like Kankuro or Shikamaru or Gaara. She sees one with hair pulled up. She turns the body over, expecting the worst, but finds that it was a woman. She still vomits. When she’s done heaving, she kicks herself. Those were perfectly good rations she just wasted. That was nutrition she needed given the privation of war. Comradery is a liability, is what it is. Not an asset. If she did not care about anyone, she would be an excellent soldier. Her meal would still be in her belly. She wouldn’t be so goddamn distracted. 

When she sees Shikamaru, alive but too thin, she feels tears roll down her cheeks and imagines they are cutting through the grime caked on her face. She continues to fight, refusing to look in his direction. She’ll be damned if she has to watch him die. 

Triage is set up hours later. She hadn’t noticed the way she was dragging her leg, but all of a sudden the pain shoots through her thigh. 

“You’ve been putting weight on a broken leg,” a pink-haired girl from Konoha says. They’re alone in a canvas tent because Gaara had made one of the best medics look at her, despite her insistence that any medic would be fine. “Must be the adrenaline that let you do that. You shouldn’t have been able to.” 

“Why am I not surprised that the cruelest kunoichi is able to walk around with a shattered femur,” Shikamaru says, walking into the tent. 

“It’s not shattered,” the pink-haired one says to Temari. “It’s an oblique fracture. I can do some work on it but you will have to wear a cast and you’ll experience inflammation in the coming weeks.” 

“Ino told me that someone who’s important in Kumo has a kidney contusion and she needs your help with it,” he says.

“Oh, my God,” the pink-haired girl says, fumbling through her bag. She grabs something, and tosses it at Temari. “Morphine. Take it. When you wake up, I’ll have already set you in your cast.” She leaves, and Temari dry-swallows the two capsules. 

“Hey,” Shikamaru says. 

“Look, I know what happens when you walk into a tent, Shikamaru, and I’m in no condition for that. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” She’s joking, of course, and he knows it. They are both silent for a minute. She’s relieved that he’s alive and thinks about opening her mouth to say it, but he says something first. 

“I’m in love with you.” He’s looking down at his feet with a scowl on his face. She remembers that her last meal wound up in putrid chunks on the battlefield, and she isn’t sure if what she just heard was real or something the morphine, being the only thing in her stomach, had made up. She reaches for his hand and holds it as the warmth spreads through her. Her eyes flutter closed and she surrenders to the darkness.


	13. Chapter 13

Shikamaru is not sure if she heard him before the medication overtook her. Her mouth parts open and her breathing is slow and deep. He takes this as an opportunity to really look at her. He’d always equated her to the sun a little bit. He avoided looking directly at her whenever possible, afraid of getting caught staring for too long. Even now, with no one to catch him in the act and no way she could know, he feels like he should look away. 

He examines the hand she had given him. There was dirt under her fingernails. Her knuckles were in bad shape, swollen and bruised. Whoever or whatever she had punched had probably been destroyed, and the corner of his mouth tugs upward affectionately. He makes a note to ask Sakura to heal that, too. 

His eyes drift up to her filthy, beautiful face. He wonders if he should wipe the smudges of dirt off her cheeks or if that’s too intimate of a gesture. He sees where her tears had stained her skin and doesn’t want to imagine anything so horrifying that it would make the toughest person he has ever met cry. Feeling he might be crossing a line, he wets a washcloth and cleans the grease and soot from her face. She doesn’t look so scary when she’s asleep, and he idly wonders if she had looked at him similarly when he had rested his cheek on her sternum a few days ago and dozed off. He doubts it. She had other things to think about.

She makes a noise and shifts a bit, but her hand remains in his. He’s so glad that she made it out alive. It hadn’t been a question for him, really. He had always thought she would survive, but things weren’t looking good for anyone for a while there. He counts his blessings. Temari is alive, and Choji. Ino, his mother, Kurenai. All safe. He wishes his father were here to celebrate the victory. He feels tears prick at his eyes. He’s not sure if they’re tears of joy or tears of sadness, but Sakura returns just then and he shouldn’t be crying anyway. 

He drops her hand. Sakura notices. Her eyes dart to the soiled washcloth and Temari’s fresh face. He’s uncomfortable with such tenderness being viewed by someone else and when she doesn’t say anything, he’s grateful for it. 

“I’ll get going,” he mumbles, about to duck out. 

“It might be better if you stayed. If there’s another emergency, it wouldn’t be professional of me to leave an unconscious patient unguarded,” she says. Both of them know that there’s a guard posted outside already. She’s giving him an excuse to stay without making him admit that he wants to, and it occurs to Shikamaru that he has never appreciated just how emotionally intelligent Sakura can be. 

“She’s going to have a large keloid scar here unless she comes back to see me once it’s healed. I could do some cosmetic work on it,” Sakura says, almost to herself, as her hands move over Temari’s thigh. 

“Have you seen her skin? I don’t think she cares if she scars,” he answers, sitting on an empty cot.

“Huh,” says Sakura, retrieving some gauze. “I guess she probably wouldn’t mind if you stayed in the tent while I undressed her, then.” 

“Why do you say that?” 

“No reason.” 

His face is bright red as he realizes, too late, that Sakura had probably seen Temari’s scars when she made her initial diagnosis. The majority of which were covered by her clothing. Only someone who had seen her undressed would know how heavily scarred she is. He has the feeling that Temari would appreciate some measure of discretion regarding their relationship, whatever that relationship is, but the stress and lack of sleep has made him careless. He knows he would have thought of that sooner if he hadn’t just spent the last two fucking days awake and hungry and covered in dirt and blood. He’s glad Temari isn’t conscious to murder him for his slip. 

“Troublesome,” he mutters. 

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone,” Sakura says, sensing Shikamaru’s discomfort, as she wraps Temari’s thigh. “I’ll owe Ino money if everybody finds out.” 

“You bet on my sex life?” Shikamaru asks, a little too stunned for decorum. Sakura blushes at the question but keeps working. 

“We bet on when you two would get together,” she corrects, clearly embarrassed.

“We’re not together,” he says, and the medic pauses to look at him as if to say _are you serious?_ For a while, she silently unwinds rolls of different materials over Temari’s leg. 

“Kankurō is being healed himself, and Gaara has a lot on his plate right now,” Sakura says eventually. “Are you going to be here when she wakes up?” 

“Of course,” he says. 

“She’s going to be in considerable pain,” Sakura passes a small bag to him. “Five milligram capsules. Not nearly as much as what knocked her out earlier. That’s all I can give her. There’s very high demand for morphine right now, so it’s scarce. Tell her to take one only if the pain is unbearable.” 

“There’s ten here. If she finds out that other people need them, she’s not going to take a single one,” he says, his mind going to that under-furnished apartment in Konoha or the office she shares with Gaara as evidence. 

“Well, she needs them, too. I wouldn’t tell her,” Sakura says, finishing up her work. “She’s going to be groggy when she wakes up. I’m sure you know I have other patients who need me. If there’s an incident, come find me.” She rushes around, putting materials away and final touches on Temari’s leg, and hurries out to treat someone else. He moves the cot closer to hers, and grabs her hand once again. 

Maybe he’s being too attentive. This isn’t even close to a life-threatening injury, after all. She’d just have to get around with crutches for a few months. She’s right, he is a crybaby. He thinks if she were awake she’d tell him to stop fussing over her. Or she’d distract him away from his heavy thoughts, and when he walked away from the tent later he’d realize that _she_ had been comforting _him_ with her levity and her severity despite the fact that she was the one with the broken leg. He falls asleep in a seated position, slumped over her cot.


	14. Chapter 14

Shikamaru saunters into the room he will be sharing with Kiba and Naruto for the week or so. They’re on an A-ranked mission and staying in Suna while they look for the failed assassin of a politician from the Land of Fire. Intel said he is somewhere in the desert, getting aid from a citizen of Suna. There are serious diplomatic implications, and the Suna council requests reports from the three men daily. 

One of those council members, a certain princess, had asked which of the three men would want to stay to help her fill out the paperwork and file the information. Shikamaru had smirked at her, and she smirked back. Both of the men next to him would do anything to get out of something so tedious. 

“That would be Shikamaru,” Kiba had said, clapping the Nara on the back. 

“Ugh, I don’t want to,” he answered, tilting his head up to look at the ceiling and smoothing his tied hair. “Make Naruto do it for you.” 

Shikamaru had let the men argue over him, occasionally interjecting, before the two finally decided that Shikamaru would do it, Naruto and Kiba would go get a drink with Gaara, and then they’d both buy Shikamaru dinner tomorrow night. 

Kiba and Naruto hurried out with the Kazekage, convinced that Shikamaru had gotten the worse end of the deal. Shikamaru followed them out, closing the heavy door behind them with a _you assholes owe me_.

“I like that you got them to buy you dinner _and_ owe you a favor,” she said, standing up from her desk. 

“I like how you look in those--” Shikamaru didn’t get to finish his sentence before her underwear hit his face as he turned to look at her.

Three hours later, he was strolling back to his quarters. The air was oppressively hot despite the fact that the sun had set hours ago. He felt sand in his sandals and was sure it would get into his pack and all over his apartment when he got home. People were unfriendly to him as he passed. Suna was never too keen on outsiders, and as soon as people saw the Konoha insignia, they glared. He didn’t care about any of that. He felt fucking amazing. 

He unrolls his bedding next to Kiba who looks at him, a few too many beers or sake or that weird agave liquor they make out here in Suna in his system. 

“You smell like a girl,” he says, laughing. He lets his drunken head rest near Shikamaru’s fingers. His nose twitches and he sits upright immediately. “You fucked a girl!” 

He really should have gone straight to a bathhouse after his tryst, but he liked her scent. He wanted to fall asleep surrounded by reminders of her, smelling the fingers he’d inserted into her, inhaling her as deeply as he could. He’d often lamented that she didn’t smell stronger, that the scent fades in a few hours.

“Yeah, so?” Shikamaru answers casually. There’s no denying it, but no one would assume it was Temari. “You thought that paperwork took three hours? It was done in twenty minutes.” 

He’d been seeing her for not quite a year now, starting when she had woken him up in that tent in the immediate aftermath of the war.

“Hey, Shikamaru,” she’d said, shaking his shoulder. He had swatted her hand away, thinking it was Choji waking him up for the next day of the war. He had dreamed of the dead bodies of his comrades. Their faces were pale and grotesque. They grew paler and paler before his eyes. And then the bodies, drained of all color, rose up. They were all White Zetsu.

Her next nudge had not been so gentle, and she knocked him all the way back. He landed on the floor, blinking the ceiling of the canvas tent into view. The sudden shock of hitting the ground after being in the throes of a nightmare had activated something in him, and he was immediately on his feet, his hands together, beginning to weave his clan’s signature jutsu. 

Temari had been watching him, unamused. He registered, about a second after his hands wove the third sign, that he wasn’t in danger. Just the opposite. 

“When you’re quite done,” she had said, annoyed, “I could use some water, and I can’t exactly hop over to my canteen.”

He had grinned and fetched his own water, handing it to her. He could let her boss him around all day. She drank greedily, wiping her mouth when she was done. There was something sexy about it, and Shikamaru had to look away for a few seconds to compose himself. He didn’t get long, though, because she jabbed her index finger into his chest. 

“If you ever smack my hand away again, you’ll be lucky to end up on the floor,” she said. His grin grew somehow wider, and be bent down, placing his smiling lips on her frowning ones. They kissed for a second before he pulled away. 

“You taste disgusting,” he had said, chuckling. He probably didn’t taste any better. These weren’t the most amorous conditions to be under and he became suddenly very aware of how badly he wanted to bathe. And how he wouldn’t mind Temari helping him with it. 

“I threw up in the battlefield because I thought I saw your body,” she said, her eyes glinting with mischief. That was enough to put a stop to all his thoughts of sex. “You want another kiss?”

“They wouldn’t leave my body. They’d bring it home, now, Temari. I’m the head of the Nara clan,” he said lightly. But the implications of his words soon set in. He actually hadn’t thought of his new status before. He clenched his jaw as Shikaku’s face entered his mind and he had to work to not spiral like he had when he lost Asuma. 

“You’re a Lord now, then?” Temari had said, pulling him out of his troubled thoughts. “That’d be tough to sell, especially since you’re foreign. Not impossible, though. Your war credentials help, too. Certainly better optics than some chunin from Konoha.” 

“Are you asking me to be your boyfriend?” Shikamaru had asked, smirking. 

She rolled her eyes. “It’s probably best that we don’t make this public for a while, until I’ve felt out how Suna will be handling diplomatic relations moving forward.” 

“Who knew you could be so romantic?” Shikamaru had said. But he was thrilled. 

In truth, he didn’t mind keeping it a secret. He never did like people knowing his business. Presently, though, Kiba was encroaching very close to his business. 

“What’s happening?” Naruto asks, waking from his tipsy slumber. 

“Shikamaru fucked a girl!” Kiba nearly yells. 

“Yes, I had sex with some kunoichi I met,” says Shikamaru, rolling his eyes. Nothing he is saying is technically a lie. Not that he is opposed to lying. He just isn’t interested in expending the energy it would take to keep track of said lie. 

“How?” Naruto asks, sitting up. “I can’t get past kissing girls. They all seem so nervous.”

Shikamaru laughs out loud and catches himself before he says _have you tried older women?_

“I’ve never had problems getting women to sleep with me,” Shikamaru says. He hears a _whaaaat_ from Naruto’s futon and has to fight a smile. 

“How?” Kiba asks, urgently, as though he’s going to take notes. 

“Women like it when you’re aloof, for one,” he answers, settling down under the blankets. He’s pleasantly exhausted. “You don’t stand a chance.” 

He is asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow and dreams of messy hair and scarred, sun-kissed skin. The nightmares he experienced in the aftermath of the war didn’t creep into his sleep as often anymore. He wakes to Kiba’s loud snoring around daybreak and can no longer smell Temari. After a cigarette, he drags himself to the shower, washing off whatever Kiba’s superior nose could detect, and prays to smell like her again by the end of the day. 

Once he’s dressed, he stands over his teammates, nudging Kiba with his foot. Kiba, hungover, swipes at Shikamaru’s leg. 

“You still smell like her,” he mumbles into Akamaru’s fur before pulling himself up. 

“That’s not possible. I just took a shower,” Shikamaru says, lazily putting his hands in his pockets. His fingers wrap around something, and, surprised, he pulls it out. Temari’s panties. It’s what Kiba had to have been smelling. He realizes, too late, that he must have put them in his pocket as he closed the distance between them and undid her shirt too excitedly, ripping off a button by accident. 

“I am never going to find that button,” she had said against his mouth. “I guess this shirt is ruined, then.” She ripped it the rest of the way open. It was so sexy that what little control he had was gone. He had turned her around and bent her over the desk, pulling her skirt up and tracing the scar on her thigh where she’d injured herself during the war with his fingertips. He’d always admired it. He thinks of it as proof of her valor and strength. His fingers traveled further up, and he stroked her clitoris before putting two of his fingers into her. His mouth goes dry as he remembers how wet she was. She’d probably been planning this all day, and he likes that he’d been standing in front of her not five minutes ago without realizing how excited she was. And he likes that he has this effect on her. He likes it a lot. It makes sense that he had ended up with the boyshorts, either accidentally or subconsciously and on purpose.

Kiba’s mouth is unhinged for a solid couple of seconds before he howls with laughter. “Who knew you were such a sicko?”

“Why are you so loud?” Naruto says, waking up to Kiba’s noise for the second time. 

“Shikamaru took the girl’s panties!” Kiba is practically singing at this point, and Shikamaru pinches the bridge of his nose. He is certain that the headache he feels coming on will get considerably worse as he spends more time with the two idiots in front of him. Not that he didn’t love them. 

Naruto shoots up with surprising speed. “Let me see!” 

“What are you, twelve? I will not show you some woman’s panties,” he says, exasperated. He is literally never going to live this down. 

“You’re the one who kept the panties,” Kiba points out accusingly. 

“It was obviously an accident,” Shikamaru answers, his cheeks red. “I’m leaving. I’ll see you guys at the meeting point in an hour.”

“Okay, see you then, pervert!” Kiba calls at Shikamaru’s back as he opens the door. Everyone on the street outside turns to look at him, and he nearly implodes from embarrassment. 

He knocks on Temari’s door a few minutes later and she opens it immediately. She had probably sensed him approaching. She grabs him by the collar and yanks him in, slamming the door shut with him against it. She kisses him and his headache is gone. Kiba is probably right about him being a sicko, he thinks, because he likes the way her saliva tastes. He could spend all day alternating between tasting the inside of her mouth and her vulva. He ignores the _sicko sicko sicko_ he hears in his head. He does not want to be thinking about Kiba of all people as her tongue runs over his. But that reminds him. 

“I, uh, wound up with this,” he says, pulling the fabric out of his pocket and handing it to her. 

“Oh, thank God. When I couldn’t find them last night after you left I was convinced that Gaara was going to see them on a lampshade or something in our office and never look me in the eye again,” she says, laughing. “Or worse! He’d probably let it go for months and bring it up in an argument.” 

“Well my comrades _did_ see them and think I’m a world-class freak,” he answers, looking at her fondly.

“They’re not wrong,” she says, her voice low and sweet. She brushes her hand over his erection through his pants. 

“I have to meet them in forty-five minutes,” he says, knowing that he isn’t going to say no to her offer. 

“I can think of something we can do. Twice, if we’re efficient.” 

Shikamaru stumbles out of her apartment half an hour later, rubbing the sore spot on his clavicle where Temari had sucked. There is a noticeable hickey. 

“You’re going to be the death of me,” he says, waving goodbye. 

“Get over it, crybaby. And you’d better not be too tired to report to me tonight.”


	15. Chapter 15

After the war, it had been easier than he expected to compartmentalize things. Thoughts of his father’s last moments, of the heavy scent of blood and the twisted corpses at his feet, of the love of his life with her leg bent at a disturbing angle, still walking somehow, all occupied neat little boxes in his mind that he decided not to open. 

His mother had looked at him wistfully as she held his hand after Shikaku’s funeral. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking. She looked years older than he remembered, her crow’s feet more pronounced and her hair graying at the roots, gravity pulling her skin towards the earth. He knew he bore a deep resemblance to his father and wondered if it hurt her to look at him. And he knew his own face looked aged and haggard from the horrors of war.

Nothing was buried in the ground where his father’s headstone was erected. There was nothing but ash where HQ had once stood, and Shikamaru and Ino both decided that it was more productive to rebuild the world than dig through smoldering rubble looking for the charred bones of their fathers.

He and Ino had gotten drunk together in silence after, still in their mourning clothes. They were getting served long after they should have been cut off, the bartender looking at them with pity. It was the same look that had him avoiding people when Asuma had died. 

He didn’t say it, but he was proud of his teammate. Ino had grown up so much since they were paired together as genin. She’d grown even since Asuma died. Everyone from that graduating class had.

He thought of Choji, who went from being a self-conscious kid to confident, capable ninja. And Hinata, who went from a weak little girl to a brave, loyal kunoichi. He thought of Sakura, once just a girl with a crush, who became the strongest shinobi in their ranks. And he thought of Naruto. Naruto, who no one had loved. Who had been ridiculed and hated by the entire village. Naruto, who had all the odds against him. Naruto befriended everyone he met. He persevered despite the whispers of who he was. He said _fuck the odds_ and saved the world despite the world’s cruelty. 

He fell asleep that night on Ino’s couch after walking her home and the tidy little boxes in his mind opened up and wrought havoc in his unrestful slumber. His nightmares always were one step ahead of him. He could never outsmart his own subconscious and he dreamt that he was in his father’s body. He dreamt that Shikaku stayed conscious and aware as he burnt. He couldn’t stop the dream despite logic telling him that Shikaku’s death had been instant and painless. And he dreamed of Sakura standing over Temari and muttering that she can’t save her. And he dreamed, again, of the corpses rising up and marching towards him. 

He had woken up with a start and saw Ino standing over him. 

“You were calling her name,” she had said. There was no smugness in her tone, no teasing like he’d expected. Just concern. He had buried his head in his hands before standing up and leaving. 

Of course he’d been calling her name. He was an advisor now for the Hokage and an important member of the community. He was the head of his own clan. And all his thoughts were and are occupied, somehow, by Temari. 

He’d read that the honeymoon phase in a romantic couple typically lasts six months. He and Temari are past that mark, and he figures that the measurement doesn’t account for distance. 

As he walks to meet Kiba and Naruto, he thinks about how he’s lucky that he’s disciplined enough not to walk too close when he escorts her through Konoha. Not to reach out and hold her hand, or pay her too many compliments in the company of others. 

He’s never liked people who are in love. Being in love makes you stupid, and being stupid makes you bad on missions. And deeply annoying. He’s tuned out so many conversations from his comrades about women that he’s lost count. He’s glad that Temari chose to err on the side of caution when it came to their relationship. It doesn’t give him the opportunity to be annoying or stupid. 

He waves at Kiba and Naruto as he approaches, and Kiba sniffs the air. 

“What the hell is wrong with you? It’s not even noon yet,” Kiba says. Shikamaru realizes what he smells, and he shrugs. 

“I, uh, returned them.”

“Must have gone really well,” Kiba says, narrowing his eyes. 

“Wait, you got laid again?” Naruto asks, always slow on the uptake. 

“It’s not relevant,” he answers. 

“I don’t get it. You aren’t handsome,” Kiba says, circling him. 

“Nope,” Shikamaru agrees. 

“I think you’re handsome, Shikamaru,” Naruto chimes in. 

“Thanks, Naruto.” 

“Do you tell them you’re rich or something?” 

“I’m done talking about this. We have a mission,” Shikamaru says, rolling his eyes and proceeding into the desert. 

It was a mission with a lot of waiting. A lot of staking out locations. A lot of time to think. He remembers last month resting his cheek high on her inseam and breathing in deep through his nose. She was in Konoha for something, and he had just made her come with his mouth and his fingers for the first time. No aid from her hand sneaking down to help. He felt like he was solving the puzzle. 

“You’re getting very good at that,” Temari said when she caught her breath. Her cheeks were red and there was a pink flush across her exposed chest to match.

He had hummed in response, kissing the stretch marks on the inside of her thigh. He leaned in for a second round, his tongue tracing the edge of her labia, hoping to get her excited again so he could eventually slide up, kissing her beautiful mouth, and slip himself inside of her. 

“Do you remember when I was sitting right here, in this chair, trying to seduce you a few years ago?” 

He had choked right there, certain that this was his death, and certain that he’d be pleased to die with his face wedged in between her thick, solid legs. 

“Not at all,” he sputtered out, before pulling away and looking up at her. He wondered if she liked the view, like he liked it when she looked up at him from his cock. 

“Yeah, it was before the war. You got me that arrangement the same day,” she said, chuckling and gesturing at the succulents on her table. 

“Oh my God,” he said, covering his eyes with his fingers. He remembered with perfect clarity. The silken pajamas, the unbound breasts. That extra button undone like a _come hither._ “You mean I could have been doing this for years?” 

He smiles at the memory. Being in love makes you stupid, and he realizes he hadn’t actually been paying any attention to his survellance work. A pale tumbleweed rolls by and it reminds him of her unruly hair. And then he chastises himself, because that’s so fucking dumb. But everything reminds him of her. He fights himself in conversations with Choji and Ino not to go and say _that reminds me of something Temari said_ , or _Temari had this interesting point the other day_. 

And when they stumble into the Kazekage’s office, covered in dust and exhausted from the heat, and he watches something click over Kiba’s face, he realizes just how stupid love makes you. Because he should have been approximately one hundred steps ahead of this moment. And he should have a plan on the off-chance that this were to happen. And he doesn’t. So he takes a split second to assess the situation, the panic and adrenaline temporarily clearing himself from his stupid, love-drunk fugue.

A few hundred scenarios roll through his head. Not one of them play out well. He considers kicking Kiba in the chest and out into the hallway, which would be the least-embarrassing option. It’d be two against one, though, and there were no great medical ninjas in Suna to heal the bite wounds he’d inevitably sustain from Akamaru. Kiba is also physically stronger, but fighting Kiba would only prolong the inevitable. 

Shikamaru chooses the path that requires the least amount of work. 

“Don’t,” he warns, and it’s good advice. It would be best for Kiba to pretend that he smells nothing. To not say a word. To avoid pissing off the meanest kunoichi in the world. Unfortunately for all involved, Kiba is not the type of man to analyze the situation. He doesn’t think before he acts. He doesn’t see how badly this can go. 

A smile breaks out over Kiba’s face. “It’s the princess! Shikamaru is fucking the princess!” 

Temari’s mouth is in a thin line and her eyes glint murderously. Naruto, on the other side of Kiba, has his jaw on the floor and hasn’t recovered, and Shikamaru realizes that he’s been holding his breath. His fists are clenched and he’s about to whisper _you stupid bastard_ when he hears a voice behind him. 

“Yes, for almost a year now,” Gaara says. Shikamaru’s head turns. The Kazakage hasn’t looked up from his papers.


	16. Chapter 16

Any jōnin worth their rank can recognize a misdirection. Sometimes, when ninjas want to throw you off their scent, they’ll set up decoys in their wake. Of course, when a ninja finds a decoy, they begin to mistrust their surroundings. Suddenly everything looks like a decoy. 

What happens, then, when someone finds a decoy before he ever realized he was being misdirected? 

Just after the war, when Temari returned from the onsen just outside of Konoha, the Kazekage had narrowed his eyes so slightly that it was imperceptible to his two siblings. The onsen, he knew, was three klicks northwest of their location, and downwind of them. But her skin still looked dewy with water and sulfur hung just a tad too strongly in the air. It was as though she hadn’t come home against the wind, as though she’d just splashed water from the hot spring on her as she walked home. But why? 

After she’d gone to bed, he had crept past her sleeping form and sifted through her bag. He considered himself lucky to be so quick and so quiet. He didn’t want to think about what sort of confrontation he’d have with her if he’d gotten caught. Sure enough, he found a metal flask with a stag engraved on it. He’d never seen the item before, and Temari had very few personal possessions. He would have remembered if she owned something like this. Unscrewing it, he discovered the pungent scent of minerals.

 _Curious_ , he had thought.

Temari was in a league of her own when it came to deception. That’s one of the reasons he immediately ruled out that she’d been replaced by a high-level ninja with the goal of infiltrating Suna or tampering with alliances. It was clearly her, and only someone on her level, someone trained to be just as suspicious, would be able to spot a lie of hers.

It was troubling, but he was certain that Temari wouldn’t do anything treasonous. Despite that, Gaara was cautious. He felt that he held the power in the situation if Temari wasn’t aware of his suspicions. He did not confront her, sure that if he had, she’d quickly right any of the mistakes that may have exposed her and he would never get to the bottom of this. 

Having seen the decoy, he now paid attention to what Temari did and said. He listened carefully for spikes in her heart rate when she spoke. He followed dead ends. He learned nothing. 

That is, until he found a clue where he least expected it. It had been a few months after the war, and he was in Konoha on business. In the evening, Naruto had pulled him out of the Hokage tower for a drink, talking a mile a minute like he always did, with Shikamaru silently walking beside them. 

“I can’t stay out long, I have something to do,” Shikamaru had said. 

“Shogi with another dignitary? I don’t envy you,” Naruto had said. “Anyway these bars seem to overcharge us ninjas. They know we can afford it but _come on_.” 

“You’re such a child,” Shikamaru said, rolling his eyes and producing a familiar flask. “Here. I keep this around in case that chunin they have assigned as my assistant drives me a little too crazy.” 

_Curious_ , Gaara thought, reaching for the flask after Naruto had taken a swig. It looked identical to the one Temari had had in her bag a few months before. 

“What fine craftsmanship,” he commented casually, running his fingers over the engraving. “Where did you obtain it?” 

“It was a gift from one of my relatives for when I became the clan head. He made it himself. The deer is our clan symbol,” he said.

“One-of-a-kind,” Gaara murmured, and Shikamaru nodded, not realizing what he had just confirmed to the Kazekage. 

The answer came when Shikamaru had been passing through Suna on his way to a mission in the far west of Wind. Shikamaru was only in the village to replenish supplies. Gaara had read the dossier on the mission, and there was something oddly _Temari_ about the agenda. According to the document, Shikamaru’s stop in Suna would last three hours. Two hours allotted to get Suna-issued rations and whatnot, and one hour as a contingency. 

Shikamaru was a careful man, but he was a man who didn’t need a contingency. He could predict things down to the very second with surprising accuracy. He was a man who didn’t throw off his entire agenda by an hour. _Contingency_ was a word Temari used to give herself freedom. 

Temari had scheduled this day off for herself long before the dossier had reached Gaara’s hands. And so, when the dots connected in his head, he told his security detail to go home. And when Shikamaru’s “contingency” hour came around, Gaara flew across the rooftops of his village until he landed on top of her apartment. He was careful to suppress his chakra. To take even unnecessary precautions, knowing how cunning his sister was. He pressed an ear down, but she had a seal over her apartment that made it soundproof.

Of course. He should have expected as much. So instead, he concentrated hard on their heartbeats. He could feel a familiar thrum that he knew belonged to Temari and, next to it, beat Shikamaru’s heart. He sensed both of their hearts pick up, up, up. He furrowed his brow. Their chakra levels were normal. And then the realization hit him. 

He felt disgusted with himself. He felt like a pervert. Like he was peeping. He stood, unsteady at first, and flew across the rooftops to the apartment he shared with Kankurō. 

“You look sick,” Kankurō had said. Gaara hadn’t answered. 

Suddenly, he saw her decoys everywhere. Her lies were obvious to him. The flush in her cheeks when Konoha came up became more pronounced. The minor uptick in her pulse when she saw Shikamaru may as well have been a signed confession. When Gaara knew exactly what to look for, it was all he could find. 

And when he was in Konoha and with Naruto who inevitably had Shikamaru in tow (who would excuse himself early only if Temari was in the village as well), he would fight some illogical impulse to intimidate him. To say that he’d killed before and he doesn’t mind doing it again if it’s for his sister. But Temari could hold her own, he knew. If Shikamaru broke Temari’s heart, there’d be consequences far more severe than just Gaara’s wrath. 

After a few drinks, when Shikamaru would stay around that long, Gaara couldn’t help but try to get a rise out of the Nara. He once mentioned someone the council had suggested as a potential match for Temari. Rich, from the Land of Wind, handsome, and smart. Not a shinobi, but he had the basic training. This person was totally made up. Gaara had watched in quiet amusement as Shikamaru’s eyebrow had twitched, betraying his otherwise blank face. 

And he is still relatively amused when Kiba Inuzuka comes to the same conclusion that Gaara had all those months ago and handles it decidedly less delicately than Gaara had. 

“Out! All of you,” Temari says, standing. Her face is dark and Gaara had only seen that look a few times before. And each time had ended in fearsome displays of power.

He considers mentioning that this is his office, too, but thinks better of it. He stands, closing what he was working on, and begins to usher the other three men out the door. 

“Not. The dog boy,” she spits out. Gaara seamlessly moves to only usher Shikamaru and Naruto out, knowing that reminding her that killing him would reflect badly on relations between Konoha and Suna would only anger her further. 

When they’re out the door, Gaara calls an assistant in from the office across the hallway over to him. 

“How bad would it be if my sister killed a Konoha shinobi?” The Kazekage asks her. There must be something left in his system from his previous life as a bloodthirsty child, because he only said it to enjoy the look of despair on Shikamaru’s face. He continues his conversation in hushed tones and walks with her down the hallway and away from the two men from Konoha. 

“Oh my God,” Shikamaru says, his head in his hands. 

“She’s not really going to kill him, is she?” Naruto asks next to him. 

“I don’t know,” he responds, looking up at the ceiling. 

“Why can’t we hear anything from the office?” 

“It’s soundproof,” he says miserably. He slumps down in the hallway. 

“How do you know tha--” Naruto starts and then gets a wise look on his face. “Ah, I see. You know, I didn’t spend all that time with Jiraiya and not learn a thing or two. So if you have any questions…” 

“Naruto, please be quiet,” he says. 

“Wait a minute, what about Kiba?” Naruto remembers as he turns around to bang on the heavy door. From his periphery, Shikamaru sees his comrade breathe in and go orange for a moment. He kicks the door down. 

“Ah, Naruto,” comes Temari’s voice from the office. “We were just about to invite you back in.” 

Shikamaru pulls himself up as he sees Gaara round the corner. 

“Naruto, I hope you know we’ll be billing you for the damage,” Gaara says, his tone teasing. The Kazekage enters the office as though nothing is wrong. 

Shikamaru steels himself and shrugs through the door. He’s good at being unassuming. Out of the way, even. Stealth is one of his strengths. But he’s on trial here and he knows it. He’s grimacing down at his feet. This is going to be brutal. Firstly, he is certain he is about to take Kiba to that tiny hospital they have here. Temari wouldn’t kill him, he was sure. Maiming, though? She may not think twice about such a fate for someone so disrespectful. Secondly, he knows his luck. When in rains, it pours. So that whole loose end with Sakura that he’s always been paranoid about it bound to come to light because why wouldn’t it at a time like this? And thirdly, he’s single now. This entire situation is due to his carelessness. 

“Kiba? Do you have something to say to Shikamaru?” 

Temari’s voice is that of a strict academy teacher. That’s unexpected. He looks up. Kiba is somehow in one piece, and his eyes are cast down in contrition. 

“I’m sorry, Shikamaru,” Kiba says. “You were assigned as the leader of this mission from the Konoha side and I undermined you. I will respect you going forward.” 

It sounds almost rehearsed, and Kiba looks at Temari imploringly. What the fuck had happened in those few minutes they’d been in the hallway?


End file.
